Cultural Pluralism and Multicultural Education in the US

Introduction: Cultural Diversity in the United States

The American territory is well-known for its cultural pluralism. The outstanding cultural diversity and ethnic pluralism in the United States call for cultural awareness and special social education of community members in order to avoid serious problems such as racism and discrimination. The basis of modern democratic society requires more than tolerance toward different racial, ethnic, or social categories. Contemporary cultural and ethnic studies aim at a globalization grounded in the cultural awareness of each individual in society. The main premises of cultural awareness hold that individuals should have knowledge of the different traditions, customs, and ideologies specific to each culture. It is essential for the proper functioning of any social environment that cultures outside what is usually called the mainstream white civilization not be regarded as "minorities" in cultural terms simply because they constitute smaller populations in a given territory.

Demographic Landscape and Minority Contributions

In the United States, approximately 75% of the total population is non-Hispanic White, while the remainder is composed of different cultural groups, including African Americans, Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans:

"Almost 75% of the U.S. population identifies as non-Hispanic White (U.S. Census Bureau, 2000), while about 12.3% is African-American, 12.5% is Latino/Hispanic, 3.6% is Asian, 0.9% is Native American or Alaskan Natives, and 0.1% is Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islanders." ("Diversity and Citizenship," 107)

Some regions of the United States have a predominant Latino or African American population. Los Angeles and Brownsville, Texas, for example, have Hispanic populations exceeding 80%, while Alabama and Detroit have Black populations of nearly 90%. ("Diversity and Citizenship," 105) These statistics underscore the importance of cultural diversity in the United States. Beyond the numbers, the cultural contributions of these minority groups to the overall history of America cannot be neglected. As Ignatiev emphasizes, African Americans, as well as other minority groups, cannot be regarded as exceptions to the mainstream culture or as exotic outsiders, but as an integral part of American history:

"In looking at the history of Afro-Americans in this country, one must look at it not as if this is some exotic group of interesting people in a foreign country about whom we ought to learn a little bit more, but rather understand that the history of Black folk in the United States is central to the history of Americans as a whole. That applies to the shaping of the American national identity, to the particular forms that the American republic takes, to the meaning of citizenship, to the meaning of westward movement, to the meaning of labor movement, of reform, of every aspect of American society." ("Diversity and Citizenship," 104)

African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans have played an essential role in shaping American culture. Nevertheless, in the early United States, they were not considered citizens of the country. The right to vote or to hold public office was given exclusively to white males, thus grounding citizenship in criteria such as race, ethnicity, and gender. Although this has changed over time and minority groups now hold equal legal rights, the cultural awareness of society remains insufficient. As a result, significant emphasis has been placed in recent decades on the promotion of cultural studies and on finding ways to integrate multicultural education into the general school curriculum.

Multicultural Education and James A. Banks

One of the best-known textbooks of multicultural education is Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies by James A. Banks. In his study, Banks emphasizes the need for a new educational curriculum, or at least its adjustment, so as to direct students toward a better understanding of the cultural plurality in their environment. This is not supposed to be a mere add-on to general academic preparation, but an essential part of its basic structure. Multicultural education aims to help students understand the different cultures that share their social environment. Although all citizens of a country may be homogenized into the broader population through shared laws and patterns of living, major cultural differences individualize them, pointing to the importance of cultural awareness.

Banks presents in his book the main methods that teachers and instructors can use to ensure that their educational approach is multicultural. He also stresses that multicultural education does not address minorities alone, and that everyone should participate in it. As Banks has emphasized in his previous works, multicultural education can be achieved through four approaches, ranging from a more superficial to a deeper understanding of difference. The first approach is the contributions approach, which consists of introducing discrete cultural elements into the curriculum, such as important historical figures, holidays, or traditions specific to a given culture. The second is the additive approach, in which teachers gradually incorporate cultural content into the general curriculum, deepening students' understanding of different cultures. The transformation approach involves a more complete renewal of the initial academic material so that it is directly concerned with multicultural issues. The most radical is the social action approach, in which cultural education moves from passive understanding to active civic engagement.

These four approaches collectively stress the importance of embedding cultural plurality within the educational curriculum to ensure that multiculturalism becomes part of every individual's formation. As Banks points out, modern democratic society requires that students develop multicultural skills in order to promote progress and diversity:

"To fully participate in our democratic society, these students and all students need the skills a multicultural education can give them to understand others and to thrive in a rapidly changing, diverse world." ("Teaching Strategies," 37)

According to Banks, multicultural education is the first necessary step toward correcting the faulty dialogue between different ethnicities sharing a common territory. In the culturally plural environment of the United States, it is important to incorporate cultural awareness into the basic formation of the individual so that he or she can act as a member of a democratic community:

"Consequently, an important goal of citizenship education in a democratic multicultural society is to help students acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to make reflective decisions and to take actions to make their nation-states more democratic and just." ("Diversity and Citizenship," 4)

Works Cited

Banks, James A., ed. Diversity and Citizenship Education: Global Perspectives. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004.

Banks, James A. Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies, 7th ed. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2002.

Mitchell, Bruce. Encyclopedia of Multicultural Education. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999.